It seems wherever you turn in the digital marketing world these days there is some popular app updating its timeline to an algorithmic one.

Apparently this is what users really want, you see, although judging by the reactions of said users every time one of the announcements is made you’d be forgiven for assuming those Silicon Valley meeting rooms exist within actual bubbles.

Email continues to be an extremely important marketing channel, so it's important to know how well your email efforts are performing.

But while it’s easy to find out how many clicks, opens and so on your emails are getting, it can be difficult to understand the significance of those numbers without having something to benchmark them against.

The ability to elicit emotions in people has been an integral part of marketing for decades, and for online video advertising it is particularly important if you want people to share and engage with your content.

But the emotions people feel in response to particular video ads differs greatly across the world, and between different demographics such as age group and gender.

In this post I’m going to cover some key global trends in terms of emotional reactions to online video ads.

Today is International Women’s Day, which got me thinking about how women are represented in the marketing and advertising space.

Now, I know plenty of brands have had a negative impact when it comes to women’s issues (remember that ‘beach body ready’ campaign?), but others are actually doing some good, so I’m going to focus on them.

Halfway through writing that sentence my phone dinged and I saw a tweet pop up that looked quite interesting.

15 minutes of internet rabbit hole-diving later and I remembered I was supposed to be writing a sentence.

I’m not alone in this, and one of the talks at our Creative Programmatic event last week that particularly interested me was from Innovid’s Tal Chalozin, who was there to discuss how video advertisers can cater for the modern-day online attention span.

Some people seem slightly alarmed by the rise of automation in marketing.

Is it the first step towards all of us being replaced by robots that will eventually enslave humankind and force us to oil their joints until the end of time?

While that might have been a lame attempt at a joke, it is actually very relevant to the Creative Programmatic event I attended yesterday, which was all about how this largely automated channel needn’t spell the end of human creativity in marketing.

It was February last month, which meant Valentine’s Day and Super Bowl campaigns were high on the agenda for brands.

I’ll be covering both those topics in this month’s social round-up, along with plenty of exciting news from the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and House of Fraser’s odd decision to go completely off-brand and talk only in emojis.